Adam Roberts - Stone(2002)

by Anonymous Author

  I sat for a long time on the step, watching the occasional hint of cloud cast dubious half-shade on the ground below me; watching the shadows of the rock-spires slowly haul themselves round like the marker of gigantic sundials. I was trying to work out how much of my mind was free of the AI. If it were truly an AI, then it should only have access to certain cortexes – my speech centres, my motor centres. Then, provided I did not subvocalise, I ought to be able to think without being overheard ('overthought' perhaps). But what if it were something more? What if it were simply a figment of my imagination? The internal voice of a madman, the imaginary friend of schizophrenic paranoia. Eventually I spoke.

  'Is it the Wheah?'

  The Wheah, repeated the AI.

  'Are they behind this? Or one particular sect of Wheah, perhaps. I still can't think why they would, unless those political hobbyists are correct in their talk of war. War, AI? Is that what this is all about?'

  How much do you know about the Wheah?

  'How much do you? '

  I asked you.

  'I know that they are barbarians – without the dotTech to civilise them they have retained a number of archaic cultural habits. They still worship their gods. They still trade goods for money. They still fight and kill one another.'

  And how do you know these things?

  'Everybody knows them.'

  Hearsay? Gossip?

  I stood up, and started stepping gingerly down the long staircase. 'Just tell me why they want to murder this whole world? Is it some sort of practice – a dry run, perhaps. Once they know it can be done, will they spread death and destruction throughout the t'T?'

  I did not say it was the Wheah.

  'The Palmetto? That doesn't seem to make sense. And besides, you haven't denied that it is the Wheah, either.'

  Put the info-chip in your pocket.

  'What?'

  The info-chip. It is programmed into the chitin of the insect carapace you picked up in there. Believe me, you will need it; it will help you.

  I flicked the fabric switch under the waistband of my pants and pulled out a short pocket. Dropping the info-chip inside freed up my hands. 'I will go to Nu Fallow,' I said.

  Good.

  'But I want to know more.'

  And I can't tell you any more.

  'Then I'll find out for myself. I'll go to Nu Hirsch, and find out for myself.'

  Nu Hirsch is in the wrong direction. But I wasn't listening any more.

  Nu Hirsch

  1st

  Dear Stone,

  I went to Nu Hirsch, and that angered my AI. I took Klabier with me, and that angered it even more. No attachments! What can you gain by doing this thing, bringing this person along? She can only hinder you, betray you, ruin everything.

  I ignored it. Klabier and I made love one more time. She pressed the balls of her hands against my belly as she straddled me. Then we ascended into orbit and prepared for the trip across space.

  If you tell her about your mission, the AI warned, sounding more and more querulous inside my head. If you tell her that – then you will be abandoned.

  Abandoned? I repeated, surprised at this.

  Your whereabouts will be made known to the 'police'. Citizens of t'T are all around you – any of them might be an agent of the 'police'. You would be apprehended within minutes. Do you understand that? Minutes!

  'Threatening me,' I said.

  Threatening, yes, it replied. This was the deal you agreed to when you were freed from your prison. Remember? Do you remember?

  'I shall not tell Klabier anything,' I said. 'I remember the deal I made.'

  Do not spend too long in Nu Hirsch, said the AI, the threat in its artificial voice becoming clearer and clearer. That too might be seen as transgressing the basis of the agreement.

  I didn't say anything to this. It occurred to me that the tenor of my AI had changed; it was no longer merely an advisor, a facilitator. It acted now as the direct agent of my employers, whoever they were. Of course, dear stone, given the constraints of deep space it would not be possible for my employers to contact me directly; so in a way it made sense for them to deputise.

  And then the foam spilled up around me, and everything went dark.

  2nd

  Dear Stone,

  I have been a loner most of my life. I had been mostly alone even before I had spent so many years in the artificial madness of the jailstar. But I think I fell in love with Klabier. What is love? You will surely tell me, stone; the denser and stronger the heart, the more love it is capable of feeling, and whose heart is denser or stronger than yours? Of course, in saying that I fell in love with Klabier I am not going so far as to say that I truly considered her as anything other than an extension of my own appetites. But she satisfied those appetites so well!

  To be honest, I found myself severely afflicted with mood swings. For days I would be sullen, miserable, there would be a deadness and decay in the very centre of my head. Nothing was possible, nothing mattered, I was bad, and bad, and bad, and the only thing was the inevitable collapse of order into death. I could not get out of bed when I woke up, but would lie front down, my face pressed close against the weave of the cloth. But then . . . then . . . I would, for no apparent reason, suddenly swing about and about; I would leap from the bed singing, and bounce around. I would grab a startled Klabier and swing her around in an improvised dance. Everything was possible! I was free – I had been freed from a prison it was impossible to escape from. I had the entire galaxy before me. I could do anything – We could do anything. 'I love you,' I would sing into Klabier's face, 'I love you, let's always be together, let's never be apart!'

  'You're happy today!' she would reply, laughing, as we spun and spun about.

  'How can I not be happy when I am with you!' I would say. And then, because the joy and the spirit was bubbling up inside me I would repeat the sentence – but as song. 'How could I not,' I would sing, breaking free from her to skitter my feet, to the left to the right, 'be so happy. . . when you are with me.'

  'What madness is this!' Klabier would say. But she would be laughing, her face crinkled up with pleasure. And I would grab her again in a great hug, and we would stumble off together in one another's arms to make love.

  Neither of these moods would last. In general, dear stone, I think it is true to say that the 'happy' mood lasted only days, whereas the 'unhappy' mood could last a week or more. Before the dotTech left my body I never experienced anything so extreme; the nano-machines controlled the hormonal and physiological aspects of the mood swings so well, I suppose, as to more or less eliminate them. Even my years in the jailstar had not been so emotionally unstable; the monotony of my surroundings, I think, and the fact that my mood was generally depressed meant that it was at least consistent. But released from prison, with all the new experiences and stimulations, I began to find my moods swinging wilder and wilder.

  'For you,' Klabier said to me one day on Nu Hirsch, 'living is like a performance. You are like an actor or musician; you inhabit different roles from day to day. I have never met a person like you.'

  'I love you,' I said, more soberly. 'I want us to be together.' It seemed like the right sort of thing to say.

  'How absurd you are!' she replied, laughing again. 'How can you say such a thing? You hardly know me!'

  'I know myself, and therefore I know my feelings,' I said. 'You make me happy. Let's be together. We can have children.' You're forgetting, said my AI, sour and jealous, that without dotTech you are a default-setting biological female. You cannot adapt to father a child, and if you mothered a child, carrying it in your dotTech-free womb, it would probably kill you. But I ignored my AI most of the time now.

  'Children?'

  'Yes! Why not? My home world, Terne, is a paradise for children. It has a high concentration of children, schools, camps – a childhood Utopia. Why don't we go there?'

  'How funny,' said Klabier. 'I had two children. Where I come from, the world Sky, parenting
involves leaving the children as soon as possible.'

  'What were your children called?' I asked, eagerly.

  She looked at me with a strange expression, as if I had asked some sort of taboo question. But the idea of returning to Terne and raising a family with my new-found love had seized my brain. When I was in a 'happy' mood, ideas gripped me with the force of revelation. This was what I intended to do in my life; this was my destiny. To bring children into the world with Klabier.

  'Listen,' she was saying, her face more serious now. But I was gabbling; talking so rapidly I'm surprised she was able to understand me.

  'I have a job to do,' I said (Glad you remembered that commented my AI internally, with a cynical edge), 'but when it's over I'm free to do what I like. Then we can go to Terne, which is actually very close to Nu Hirsch, a slow jump through to the edge of the Tongue. It is beautiful, Terne, great steppes leading down to thousands of bays and fjords overlooking a purple ocean. The perfect place to be a child—' I believe, dear stone, that I was crying a little by this stage '—an idyll, truly. I must do this one job, that is all, and I have come here—'

  'Job?' interjected Klabier, looking more and more puzzled,

  '—come here to, I don't know, to understand it a little more, because there are things about this job that don't truly make sense—'

  Control yourself, snapped my AI. What are you saying? Will you tell her everything?

  '—I am commissioned to do this job,' I went on, 'but I don't exactly know by whom, and I was hoping to find out a little more . . .'

  'What . . .' she said, her forehead marked now with lines like an interference pattern.

  '. . . the politics angle is an interesting one, and I was wondering, before I do this job—'

  'What are you talking about?' she asked, firmly, cutting me off. 'What is this talk? I don't understand at all.'

  I paused, and looked at her face.

  Leave it, said my AI. You are on the verge of revealing everything. Do you want to go back to prison?

  I flushed, and started stammering. I remember I had to leave, to hurry out of the room and pace about the busy thoroughfares of Nu Hirsch Main for an hour or more, my AI chiding me all the time.

  But I am getting ahead of myself.

  We put on packs and let the foam envelope us, having promised to rendezvous at Nu Hirsch. Then we dropped into space, and I entered the dozy half-trance of interstellar flight.

  This is what I was thinking – and as I entered faster-than-light the thoughts started to repeat themselves, rearrange and reconfigure themselves in that monotonous fugue-state way. I thought: the AI had directed me to a single dried insect thorax amongst millions, in which is an info-chip containing something – it did not tell me what – that would help with my task. From the first, the AI had known amongst the millions of stars, which one; from amongst the millions of people (living and mummified) on that world, which one; from the millions of tiny pieces of litter on that dead individual's floor, which one. It had pinpointed this object with an accuracy that was astonishing.

  I still had the info-chip in my pocket. It made a slight bulge against my groin as I curled up for travel.

  I thought to myself of the processing power of my AI; of how it seemed to survive all my flights. It was no ordinary AI. I thought of who could possibly have the power to spring me from jail, to undertake the kind of information survey necessary to pick out the one tiny info-chip essential to the job in hand. I thought about who would want to invest that much time and energy in setting up the crime I was employed to commit.

  Then I thought about the first person I had met upon escaping the jail; I thought about Agifo3acca. He had constructed a giant spaceship, layer upon layer, room added to room. He had started, probably, with an info-chip no bigger than the one I had in my pocket. One of the standard info-chips, that had taken its orders and burrowed out through the traveller's foam without breaking the seal. That had spawned the initial nano-facilitators, that had scavenged raw materials from whatever was to hand – whichever asteroid or airless moon the traveller arrived besides. From these raw materials bigger robots could be built, more iron and carbon adapted and shaped, more simple self-replicators created. By the time Agifo3acca was ready to come out of his foam these machines would have built him the first few chambers of his ship.

  And then, when he was cleaned and ready, he could have personally directed the architectural operation of assembling the rest of his ship; sublight drives, carbon adaptors for food processing (trading for organic material to grow would come later), simple processors, observational tools. None of this would have happened quickly, and a ship the size of Agifo3acca's would have taken many years to assemble.

  Why had he done it? Why had Agifo3acca left the space of the Wheah, his home, to travel so far into the territories of the t'T? Why had he been waiting for me, when I was sprung from the impossible jail? It could not be coincidence.

  This is what I thought. The Wheah were thousands of separate cultures, billions of people. Assume they united in a common cause, against the t'T. They would have the processing power and energy to mount so enormous an undertaking. They could spend many years preparing for the crime; tracking down such info-wealth as they needed to prosecute it (the info-chip in my pocket for example); working out how to get me out of prison. Maybe the AI was Wheah technology; perhaps they had found a way – which the t'T certainly had not – of creating an AI that could survive faster-than-light travel. Perhaps it wasn't an AI at all, perhaps it was some sort of transmitter.

  Or perhaps it was a figment of my imagination. Perhaps the whole thing was merely the fantasy of my unstable consciousness.

  But my mind was locked into its pattern now. I thought, over and over, of possible motivations: the Wheah, organising a conspiracy on so huge a scale. Why? Only one answer: war. Why war? Only one reason: invasion.

  And so I was going to Nu Hirsch. When people from the Wheah made the slow sublight journey through the Tongue they – obviously – chose its narrowest point. This brought them into t'T space near Nu Hirsch. If there were answers to be found, they would be found there.

  3rd

  Dear Stone,

  The two of us stayed at Nu Hirsch for about two months, and during that time I convinced myself I had fallen in love with Klabier. I am not so sure now; but now, beloved stone, I have you, I have you. But at the time I told myself that Klabier was all in all to me. It is peculiar, and perhaps dotTech would have saved me from the rashness of my emotional commitment. But it seemed right; the pinpoint vividness of the sensation. It was more than the pleasure of sex, more than the enjoyment of her company.

  I had my first presentiment that this was what was happening when I arrived at the Nu Hirsch orbital. I was collected, washed clean and given some food. But I was so impatient to discover whether Klabier had arrived before me that – hungry though I was – I did not eat. Instead I paced up and down the Arrival Hall, checking each individual, standing beside each pod-like blob of hardened foam as it was attended to, washed with solvent to reveal the huddled human being inside.

  I stayed in the Arrival Hall for a whole day. I pestered the attendants (they were mostly automated systems on Nu Hirsch; actual people did not serve terms as arrival guides as was the case on most systems). Saying: I travelled with a friend, a lover actually. I had obviously made better time through space than her, but could you let me know when she arrives? Please?

  'Of course,' said the pleasant-voiced, gel-bodied Haüd-machine that was hosing down a new pod. 'Why not wait in recreation areas? It is more pleasant there.' They are not sentient, these Haüd-machines; they are not like an AI. They are merely well-designed robots, but they give the illusion of interacting so well that it is easy to be fooled.

  'Very well,' I said. It occurred to me, groggy though I was from my journey, that I was unusually agitated by Klabier's non-arrival. As if I cared a great deal. That made me wonder.

  I finally took some food, and sat i
n an observation alcove of the recreation room. Around me new arrivals sat and talked, eating and drinking; or else danced, played games, went off to coigns to have sex.

  I looked out at the double-system before me. Nu Hirsch is a wonderfully built-up group of worlds. Two equal-sized planets orbited one another, spinning around a notional point that itself revolved around its sun. These worlds existed in very close proximity and enjoyed an unusual regularity of their mutual orbital oscillation. This meant that Nu Hirschers were able to link the two planets with a great chain. It was an adaptation of the older technology that had once been popular on worlds, providing for space elevators with a cord that stretched from the ground to a point twice as high as geosynchronous position. Dear Stone, in the earlier days these cable-cars had been widespread; running elevators up to and down from orbit. Subsequent advances in laser precision and power meant that the technology was mostly abandoned; it is more flexible and more efficient to drop elevators balanced on the focussed needle of a laser; and to use the compression potential to raise up a second elevator whenever you want rather than simultaneously. But on Nu Hirsch they kept the older machinery; a self-generating cable, strung out, linking world and world. They liked, I think, the concept of there being a material connection from planet to planet. They liked that regular elevators cars shot up, and along, and down, that it was possible to step on to a bus and arrive on their sister world in minutes.

  From orbit, where I waited for Klabier in the arrival hall, it was impossible to make out the thread that linked world to world. Compared to the bulk of the planets the cable was infinitesimally slender. The window through which I looked at the silver-amber globes of Nu Hirsch and Nu Hirsch (the natives usually make no distinction between the names of either world, although travellers sometimes call one A and one E) - the window through which I looked was very helpful. I asked it for more resolution. It isolated a portion and magnified for me, so that I could just make out the momentary glint of a car passing and reflecting the sunlight.